FIVE MINUTE CHARACTER CREATION

I am taking a break from the GenCon entries this week because I was sitting with the boys watching Netflix shows this week and we noticed that every character we came across could be created in HiBRiD in 5 minutes or less. Once you get the hang of the rules and have played a few games, you will get to realize how STRONGLY HIBRiD is based on the character concept. With knowledge of a character concept, character creation can be very fast, especially if you have a list of aspects and their aspect point costs in front of you. (Of course if you are like us, you have those costs memorized, making it even quicker)

Presented here are the rules required to create a character to play in 5 minutes or less. Even if you don't know the aspect costs off the top of you head, you can bust out a character in five minutes and calculate the grades and action values for aspects on the fly as you are playing. You can also skip declaring the concept skills and aspects altogether and do them on the fly, making character creation even faster.

Step One: Record Genre Stats

The level of heroism and lethality of a game setting are reflected by three numbers. Record these three numbers on your character sheet.

• Heroic Factor: The heroic factor is 5
• Ité: All characters have 5 points of Ité
• Aspect Point Pool: All characters have 50 aspect points for Step 5

Step Two: Record the Character Concept

Your character concept is phrase that contains a descriptor, a role, and a mission. The descriptor is an adjective that describes your character in some way, the role is a word or two that describes what your character spends most of his time doing and the mission is what your character is willing to live and die for. This phrase takes the form seen in the following examples:  

• A telekinetic swordsman looking to remove his family’s curse
• A lovably overconfident truck driver who deals with extraordinary circumstances to help his friends
• A bald pharmacist who lives to do everything to make his friends’ and family’s lives better than his was.

Step Three: Record Human Traits

All characters are human by default. Record the following traits:

• Can Speak/Sign
• Can Use Tools
• Have sight (light), sound, touch, taste, and smell
• Can Walk, run, climb, crawl, jump, swim
• Fifty points (50) of STUN. When out of STUN, a human is unconscious
• Ten (10) points of PHYS. When out of PHYS, a human is dead

All characters have the following action values:

• Load: 10 kilograms (maximum = 10 kilograms)
• Range: 10 meters (maximum = 100 meters)
• Movement: 20 meters walk (maximum = 100 meters)

Record your character’s height, weight, age, and appearance

Step Four: Determine your character’s skills

All characters have the following 6 Common Skills. To determine how good characters are at these skills, they are assigned Action Modifiers of +0 to +5, where +5 is the skill the character is best at and +0 is the skill the character is the worst at.

• Academic-Tasks involving boomillk learning and memorization
• Athletic-Tasks involving movement not related to combat
• Combat-Tasks related to combat
• Fringe-Tasks related to living in the wilderness or outside of the law
• Social-Tasks related to dealing with people
• Technological-Tasks related to using tools and technology

All characters also have 3 Concept skills. To determine how good your character is at each of these skills, you will assign Action Modifiers of +6 to +8, again with +8 being the one you consider most important to your character’s Concept and +6 is the least important. You may declare any three sorts of tasks your character is good at to be your character’s Concept skills. The two conditions that must be met are as follows:

• They must be more specific than the Common skills
• Your Director must approve them.
• Examples include
• A swordsman might have acrobatics, rapier, and intimidation
• A truck driver might have truck driving, charisma, and power drinking
• A pharmacist might have chemistry, problem solving, and computer use  

Step Five: Determine your character’s aspects

All characters have 50 points to spend on aspects. As you purchase aspect, subtract the number of points you spend from this total and document each aspect on your character sheet.

• If the aspect is graded, it has a grade of 1. You may spend a number of points equal to the cost to upgrade it. If you do so, each time you spend this number of points, the grade increases by 1. Write the total grade on your character sheet
• If the aspect is either reactive or activated, you will need to determine the Action Modifier for the aspect. Aspects related to the character concept have an action modifier equal to the grade of the aspect +2. Aspects not related to the character concept have an Action Modifier equal to the grade.
• If there is a mode, you will need to document the mode of the aspect.

Step Six: Determine Your character’s possessions

• Clothes-If you don’t write them down, your character is naked
• Concept Kit-Write down the number 20 on your character sheet in the box entitled Uses and how your character carries his stuff on his person in the box entitled How Carried. Whenever your character needs a possession, he is assumed to be carrying it around with him if it is related to the role in his concept except for the following exceptions
• It is not related to combat
• It cannot be carried
• It can be consumed, such as matches, batteries, pitons, lockpicks, et cetera. For these items, you will subtract 1 Use from the total in the Uses box.
• Holdings-These are:
• Items not on your character’s person. If not within the distance your character can reach in an action scene of your character, you will need to designate them as holdings.
• Items close but not able to be carried
• Specified Items
• All weapons and ammunition are specified items
• Any items not related to your character concept
• Improvised Items are any non-unique, common items not related to your character concept that are not listed in the specified items. You may declare these items until the spaces on your character sheet are exhausted.
• There are 10 spaces on your character sheet for knickknacks, objects the size of a breadbox or smaller with a value less than $100 in value
• There are 10 spaces on your character sheet for Clutter, objects in size that will fit in a pocket and are less than 5 dollars in value. 

The Creation of the Canyonside Games: A History-Part 2 of 10

The Creation of  Canyonside, Part 2

Please enjoy part two of the history of the Canyonside games.

1995‐9

These were the years I went to Gen Con around professional school. I did not run any games but instead played in several games that influenced the Canyonside game.

The firs was a great game with my friend Ben that used only a single d6 to determine the event outcomes. There were between 20 and 30 of us standing around in a circle playing in a highly improvised Justice Inc. game with no character sheet and reinforced my idea that more than 10 people could easily be run in a roleplaying game if the game mechanics were simple enough. My friend, Ben, upon listening to me extolling the awesome simplicity of the single d6-based mechanic after this game ad nauseum, when I was debating scrapping the d100 mechanic of HiBRiD version 1.0 one night, told me "just keep the d20...because a d20...it just looks cool".

I also played in a tournament with my friend Terry where my character was cursed 20 minutes in, and ruined our team's chances at advancing to the tournament finals. I spent 3 hours distracting the players from their mission and had a ball doing it. While  the 2 children in our group were a bit disappointed (I would never do something like this today),  everyone else, including the kids' dad, shook my hand and congratulated me on a well-played curse and laughed at my character's crazy antics in which my character made himself invisble and went running around laughing like a hyena and distracting the players from their goals. This was where I realized that meta gaming could be so much fun and began writing game aspects actually based on it for my pregenerated characters, such as Catchphrase and Heroic Appearance. 

These years were big for the game system in general. After remembering Ben's comments, I finally scrapped all of the rest of my d100-based rules, converting them to the current "roll-a-d20/always-add/higher-numbers-are-always-better" system that currently defines the HiBRiD system v2.0. 

These years were also when the kernel for my favorite NPC, Johnny Parkour, came into existence. By combining the Justice, Inc. character I had played, named Johnny Faaaaaaantastic with the antics of the cursed character so over the top that I mentioned above, I unknowingly created him as my standard NPC template for every Canyonside game I ever ran. After adding a heavy accent and the Catchphrases "Dees eez too crayzee for me", and "I'm going to go to de club" that I based on a coworker of mine back when I worked for Chicago's Computer Wonderland, this was the Johnny Parkour that came to be loved/annoyed at every Canyonside game over the years. I would also use him to test the speed and action rules, and he eventually became the character creation example for the Player's Spielbuch.

These would also be the last years I would ever play a roleplaying game as a player.